Dark Omega

CHAPTER 40 - IN THE ZONE

Haides waited until the patrol had disappeared, then slipped away. He wandered aimlessly for a while. The weather had turned cold, and for the time being, dry. The ground was still wet and muddy, though. He didn't really mind. As long as he kept moving, he wouldn't freeze, and the too-large boots on his feet had just received a generous helping of grease and were effectively water-tight.

Hours went by as the careful boy wandered the broken, empty cityscape. A few times he came across other survivors, but he slipped away before they knew he was there. Eventually, Haides ended up at the edge old forbidden zone with the hospital building looming in the center. It made the boy think of his birthday again, the cake he never had, a Father he barely could remember, a Mother murdered, Nik, Jan, Eli, Luca, and all the others. One day there, the next, gone.

He'd come to the zone on more than one occasion. He never set out to go the—his legs would guide him there of their own volition. Like they had today. Whenever he was back at the Zone, Haides would sit and observe for a while. Observe—and think of the old times, before the war, before he was betrayed. He would stay until he could take it no more, then leave, wowing to never come back. But he always did.

After the war, there had been continued activity within the zone for a while. Not a whole lot, except for a brief period. During that time, he'd once seen a convoy of ostentatious vehicles with Conclave markings and amazons riding shotgun. Athena's woman warriors had looked quite impressive and intimidating in their white-and-gold exo-suits, pennants fluttering from their ceremonial phase lances. When the amazons helped the Coalition take Thira, they had been wearing urban camo and wielded coilguns and pulse cannons. Haides figured they were escorting someone famous, but without binoculars and a good vantage point, he couldn't see who it was.

When next Haides visited the market, he had stopped by Himilco to bargain for some purification tablets. The old apothecary had rubbed the scar at the base of his skull where the bomb was located and kept up a steady stream of gossip. The great Prelate Zhukov was in Thira to visit his good friend, First Minister Verrigan. It must have been Zhukov's column Haides had seen.

Eventually, the burst of renewed activity passed, then dwindled to nothing. No more hopper flights or armored columns coming and going. The frag-wire fences and sentry turrets remained, but the black-armored soldiers without unit markings went away. Once in a while, a Technocracy maintenance crew would arrive with an escort, stay for a few days, and then leave again. That lasted through the second winter after Haides was abandoned. After that, nothing. The Forbidden Zone, and the facility that lay at the heart of it, had stood silent and unused for the better part of a year.

Despite a series warning signs posted around the perimeter, proclaiming a ban on the area, jointly issued by the authority of Count-Planetar June I Othrys and Archon Guillaume of the Coalition, there had been several attempts at getting in over the years. From lone scavengers to armed bands of Vaxandii to groups of desperate Akakian survivors. As far as Haides knew, none had succeeded. The would-be treasure hunters had all been caught by the zone's automated defenses. Killed outright, or more rarely, driven away. It had been a while since anyone had tried, but the boy was sure the anti-intrusion measures were still working. A year or two of negligence wouldn't put a technomancer-crafted security system out of commission.

The careful boy had never tried going back inside, not even across the outer perimeter as he had done in the past. There was no point in trying. Any meaningful loot would be locked inside those hospital buildings, and there was no way to reach those. Meaning any break-in attempt would net nothing, except mortal danger. He hadn't survived for this long by taking needless risks.

The weather was taking a turn for the worse. A particularly foul wind came screaming down from the Mastaris, the place Haides's family had used to go summer skiing, carrying with it a mixture of rain and snow. That particular combination of wind and precipitation was the worst sort, guaranteed to get you wet, cold, and shivering in no time. The boy took shelter underneath a section of broken nanocrete protruding from a gaping hole in the ground. Heavy artillery shells—or air-dropped bombs—had landed here, years ago, creating a swathe of chaotic terrain that led all the way from Haides's observation point to the outer defensive perimeter. He could practically reach the fragmentation wire without risk of being seen as long as he stayed low and followed the craters.